Judge Rules in Sony's Favour in $500m Controller Comms Lawsuit | Push Square

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A US judge has ruled that Sony did not infringe on another company's patented technology with its PlayStation hardware, specifically in regard to how consoles and controllers communicate.

As detailed by GamesIndustry.biz, Genuine Enabling Technology (GET) first filed a complaint against Sony back in 2017, claiming that the PlayStation maker had infringed on its '730 Patent, entitled 'Method and Apparatus for Producing a Combined Data Stream and Recovering Therefrom the Respective User Input Stream and at Least One Input Signal.'

Amongst the many claims levelled in the case, a central point was how PlayStation consoles and controllers connect. Now, as we all know, the DualSense communicates with the PS5 by submitting a separate signal on a «slow-varying frequency» for button inputs and another, higher-frequency signal for motion control input. GET's assertion was that no device was simultaneously capable of receiving both signals until it solved the problem with its '730 Patent.

Sony now faces trial

To cut a long and rather dry story short, the judge ultimately ruled in Sony's favour. In a memorandum seen by GamesIndustry, they said that GET had «failed to raise a dispute of fact» and granted Sony's request for summary judgment of non-infringement before declaring the case closed. GET previously filed a similar lawsuit against Nintendo, which again went to the platform holder, but the US Court of Appeals reversed this decision in 2022 and is still ongoing.

Khayl is Push Square's Australian correspondent, a reporter who regularly catches the competition napping. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to specialize.

All three console manufacturers should instead be sued for releasing subpar easily breakable controller sticks, I have had to buy two extra PS5 and Xbox controllers because of the stick drift